Have you ever wondered how much lousy leaders, dysfunctional teams and a toxic culture could be costing your business?
All organisations operate on a combination of conscious and unconscious values that include positive as well as potentially limiting or negative values. An organisation's values represent what is deemed most important, at any given time. When values and their associated behaviours are practiced daily they become ingrained in an organisation’s culture.
So, just as positive values such as open communication, honesty, integrity and customer satisfaction lead to positive outcomes, potentially limiting or ‘fear-based’ values result in negative behaviour, wasted energy and often significant personal and financial costs.
Cost savings from identifying limiting values
A recent report from Barrett Values Centre highlights the financial cost of embedded values that originate from fear, or create an environment of fear. The report cites the real example of an organisation with 154 employees and an annual income of $48 million. They identified seven limiting values affecting performance and calculated the cost in lost productivity and lost opportunity to be almost $19 million per annum.
These limiting values – each with a cost to the business based on staff estimates - were expressed as bureaucracy, confusion, empire building, information hoarding, hierarchy, long hours and short term focus.
Measuring cultural values
Identifying and measuring an organisation’s values provides hard data on which to base culture change decisions. The first step is identifying what values are expressed in your current culture, and how they are affecting your business – positively or negatively.
At Peak Performance we use Richard Barrett’s Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT) to enable leaders to measure and manage values and culture. CTT is the most comprehensive cultural diagnostic values assessment available. It’s a simple on-line survey that takes about 15 minutes. The survey is customised for every organisation and is available in several languages, making it ideal for multinationals.
For organisations that suspect their culture is being influenced by limiting values, CTT is an effective way of finding out exactly what’s going on, so you can tailor a response to the right areas and deliver significant dollar savings.
Read the full article: The Cost of Fear – How much do limiting values cost an organisation? (PDF)
Contact us on 1300 567 511 to find out how we can help you identify and rectify the cultural values that are costing you money.